PHILLIP MUELLER



From small beginnings of a team of five people, FFA has grown to an organisation of over 50 staff to provide advice, technical expertise and services to its 17 member countries and territories from all over the Pacific Islands region.
Former Director Phillip Mueller was at the helm of FFA from 1981-1991. He explains in an interview how FFA grew from a small enterprise to an information hub and source of support for Pacific Islands:
“In the early days, human development was the main achievement. Prior to FFA, we had no trained fisheries people, no policy people, so that was our initial focus, human development. At the beginning, there was only one Pacific Islander heading a fisheries organisation and the rest were expats.
“You have to see this lack of people in context—we were coming out of the colonial era and the exploitation of fisheries was not on the colonialists’ to-do list, they couldn’t exploit the resource because you could not get tuna back easily to England or other places. So, the colonialists concentrated on exploiting resources they could export back to the North. And the administration they left in place was very small, very low in people. So, for instance, the countries had no fisheries department.
“So, we went to a lot of trouble to get people to Food and Agriculture Organisation and COFI meetings, looked at training programmes, scholarships, UN assistance, study tours, study exchanges—any way we could think of to increase the number and skill levels of trained people in fisheries. Of course, there was turnover with people trained moving to other things, so we needed to do human development continually. We never wrote this down but human resources was at the fore of our thinking.
“By the end of our first five years, there was only one expat left at FFA and we thought that was a good performance indicator for human development.
“This new Pacific Islander policy people went on to develop things like the Parties to the Nauru Agreement. The shift in people also brought FFA out of some turbulent early days—turbulent mainly because of the expat fisheries officers all thinking and operating based on their national interests rather than the development of the region.
“Then there were problems establishing the office here—the commercial world in Honiara was largely Chinese and the office world, banking and the like, was largely expat Australian. We came in as neither and it was a small town—so those in the know locked us out because we were new. It was tough going at the start to get services such as schoolling and office equipment. Over time, we integrated through sport and social activities and broke down some of those social barriers.
“Then there were the challenges we had collectively as Pacific Islands—when the Convention on the Law of the Sea came in, it gave us national ownership to fisheries but the next step was to exert those rights with the large fishing nations.
Early on, all the fisheries institutions were controlled by the commercial interests—Japan and the others had a strong input into FAO's Fisheries Division. They also controlled the conservation commissions and through those commercial interests had control of the fishing industry. It took a fair while to break that down and exert our ownership rights.
“When we brought in Minimum Terms and Conditions of Access and other things, gradually the Pacific Islands got a better hearing in discussions with the fishing nations—then there was a significant shift with the development of the US Treaty.
As part of the treaty, the US accepted a lot of our Minimum Terms and Conditions, developed by FFA to set terms for access of foreign countries to fishing grounds. A lot of other fishing nations, if they were forced to accept these terms and conditions, then they dragged their feet and tried all sorts of dodges.
The secretive nature of the industry was always a problem in getting them to agree to certain terms about information and responsibilities. They have jealousies and suspicions worse than any other industry—farmers exchange information about how to get better crops but never fishermen! So, the treaty helped create norms and standards we could use with other countries seeking access.
“Now we are seeing the results of earlier changes in direction such as the PNA. It came into being early in FFA’s history but it took them a while to design strategies and structures and wait until other members came on board. As the region developed better cooperation, better infrastructure in fisheries, the PNA became a turning point in fisheries development for the Pacific Islands.”

• Phillip Mueller was at the helm of FFA from 1981-1991.